


Team Bonds and Three-Ring Binders

by WindTossedCourage



Category: RWBY
Genre: Canon Compliant, Complete, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, One Shot, Post-Volume 5 (RWBY)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23049313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WindTossedCourage/pseuds/WindTossedCourage
Summary: After Team RWBY reunites at the Battle of Haven, Ruby has an idea for how to catch Blake up on everything that's happened since the Fall of Beacon.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna & Ruby Rose, Blake Belladonna & Ruby Rose & Weiss Schnee & Yang Xiao Long
Comments: 2
Kudos: 50





	Team Bonds and Three-Ring Binders

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted to that other site just before the Volume 5 finale. I decided to clean it up a bit and finally post it here. Two years later and still canon compliant!

Blake leaned against the terrace railing and stared out, tracking the few early risers already making their way through the streets of Mistral down below. Though the sun warmed her skin, the cool breeze stirring her hair reminded her that autumn had nearly arrived, eager to set the world ablaze in color for a brief moment before it fell dormant beneath muted snow and ice.

Blake had only met Ruby and Yang’s uncle briefly at the Vytal Festival, the alcohol-scented encounter cementing him in her mind as 'abrasive,' but she’d heard countless stories about him from the two sisters. He’d struck her as a sort of kindred spirit, one used to their own space but never quite used to loneliness, so she wondered what he thought of the sleeping people taking up every bed and bit of floor space of his house.

In the moments following the Battle of Haven, Qrow had taken a single glance at Sun and Ilia hanging behind Blake and waved them over. “What’s another two kids?” he muttered as he trudged off, the young boy trailing behind. “Already got enough of ‘em to start an Academy of my own.” He promised that everyone would reconvene the next day to discuss the next course of action after they’d all gotten some rest.

That night, Blake had found herself staring at the ceiling of the room she shared with her team, unused to their close proximity and their soft sleeping sighs and shifting after nearly a year of separation. Finally, she slipped outside just before dawn.

Now, her ear flicked as footsteps approached behind her.

“What do I have to do to convince you to get some sleep?” Weiss asked. “Backflips? Sing you a lullaby? Balance a chair on two legs? That one is not an easy trick.”

Blake turned to find her team standing behind her. Weiss held a tray with four mugs, while Ruby, unable to suppress a grin, hid something behind her back. Yang stared at the ground, her metal hand gripping her wrist. A sharp pain pulsed through Blake’s chest at the sight of them, but she simply smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I think I broke that habit a while back. Just a little wired from last night, I guess.”

“Well, perhaps a cup of tea will help with that.” Weiss said, handing her a mug before settling on the ground and taking one for herself. Though Weiss hid it well, Blake couldn’t help but notice how she favored her side, her hand flitting to her waist as she sat down.

Blake blew on the tea to clear away the steam and took a sip. Chamomile, steeped to perfection. A favorite of hers for late-night study sessions and post-exam and post-combat relief. She was surprised Weiss, being the coffee aficionado that she was, had remembered at all, as Blake had only mentioned her preference for the tea once or twice.

“What’s that you’re hiding there?” Blake asked Ruby as they sat down.

“Oh, this?” Ruby snapped her cape back to reveal a thick white binder, likely pilfered from Haven Academy, stuffed with mismatched sheets of colored and lined paper.

In the process, she bumped her mug, leaving Weiss scrambling to catch it before milky-white coffee spilled onto her leg. She rolled her eyes, shifting her grip to hold two mugs. “That’s Ruby’s project.”

“OUR project, Weiss.”

“You’ve done most of the work.”

“We both helped,” Yang said. “We’re bound to the binder in her eyes.”

“Aha, exactly!” Ruby stuck her tongue out at Weiss and snatched her mug back. “So,” she said to Blake. “We’ve been separated for a while now, and lot has happened since Beacon. And I mean, a LOT. At this point, it could take days, maybe weeks, to catch you up, so I figured, Blake likes to read, so why not just give her a book?” She turned the binder around to reveal the cover. _The Adventures of Team RNJR_ was scrawled across the top in red, surrounded by cartoonish doodles of Ruby, Jaune, Nora, and Ren, along with several toothy Grimm. At some point, the title was amended to add several crooked letters in black and blue ink, resulting in the new patchwork title, _The Adventures of WRNJYR & QO. _

“Oh, is Weiss leader now?” A smile crept across Blake’s face. “And how do you even pronounce that team name?”

Ruby crossed her arms and huffed. “You try coming up with a name for this many people! It’s supposed to be like ‘Team Ranger and Company.’ But now with you, Sun, and Ilia here, I have to fit in three more letters.” She sighed, somehow sounding even more world-weary than her uncle, and stared off into the distance. “Anyway,” she said, “I don’t think I can handle another living room lecture from Professor Ozpin. He goes on and on and on. Doesn’t he realize we’re not at school anymore?”

“Professor Ozpin is here?” Blake asked, mug paused halfway to her mouth.

“Sorry! Spoilers.”

Blake raised an eyebrow at that, but took the binder from Ruby and flipped through it.

The first twenty or so pages were undoubtedly Ruby’s work, filled with thumbnail sketches depicting small towns and team hijinks and detailed Grimm fights, supplemented by scrawled notes to form a comic book-style narrative. At some point, the drawings gave away almost entirely to journal entries, with the exception of one modest attempt at a rough sketch of the Mistral landscape. One entry was marked with several blacked-out lines of text and freckled with water stains. Then Ruby’s bubbly letters gave way to several pages of Weiss’s cursive and later Yang’s careful printing. Detailed ink illustrations took up the margins of Yang’s pages: Ruby wielding her scythe; Yang’s prosthetic with a gun barrel mounted on the wrist; Yang riding her motorcycle down an empty road; a dark-haired woman releasing a black bird into the air. The final dozen pages were a collaborative effort, with alternating paragraphs in different colors, first between Weiss and Yang and then with all three girls. Blake paused on the last page, a charcoal sketch of Ruby, Weiss, and Yang on the terrace overlooking Mistral. “How long have you been working on this?” Blake asked.

“Since back when we were on the road. There was one night when I had a nigh—some trouble falling asleep, so I just started drawing on the back of the map. Jaune and Ren weren’t very happy with me, but Nora pointed out that they’d both already lost the map once. It just became a hobby after that. And once Weiss and Yang met up with us, I knew they had to add to it.” Ruby fiddled with the hem of her tattered cape. “Besides, I figured that maybe one day it might be just as important to someone else as it was to me.”

Blake’s grip tightened on the binder. “Did you ever think I would come back?”

Yang stiffened but kept quiet. Ruby and Weiss glanced at her before exchanging a quick look with each other. “I can’t speak for all of us,” Ruby said, “but if I learned anything at Beacon, it’s that nothing is ever as clear or predictable as we think it should be. You think, this is what you’re going to do, and this is how it’s going to happen. You’ll go to Signal Academy for the full four years and then onto Beacon. Hopefully you’ll be on a team with someone you know from Signal, and your big sister will have her own team, and maybe you’ll go on adventures together once you’ve both graduated and are full-fledged Huntresses.

“But then things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. You skip two years and end up on a team with your sister, you meet these wonderful friends, you lose others. Sometimes for good. But maybe they come back. You get hurt, broken even, and it takes a while to recover. You also grow, get stronger. And sometimes you get dragged into an ancient battle against the evil leader of the Grimm for the fate of Remnant.” Noticing Blake’s baffled expression, Ruby shrugged. “It’s in the binder. But point is, I keep moving forward even if I can’t predict what’s coming. Some days, that’s incredibly difficult, but others days,” she glanced up from her mug to look at her team, “we find each other.” 

Blake shifted to get a better look at Ruby. Her hair was a little longer and messier than it’d been at school, and her features had sharpened a bit with maturity. Countless sleepless nights smudged the area under her eyes, but somehow, they were still just as bright as Blake remembered, catching the morning sunlight and glowing like Remnant’s shattered moon. Blake smiled and leaned back on her hands. “So we did.”

Weiss rested her hand on Ruby’s shoulder, and Ruby clinked their mugs together.

“Well, you found us,” Yang said, drawing her knees to her chest, “but are you going to stay?” Her mouth pressed into a hard line, and her left hand twitched. She kept her eyes trained on the ground, unable to hide how they’d dulled from lavender to indigo, a radiant sunset lost to the onset of dusk.

Memories flickered to the surface.

Screams and the roar of flames. Searing pain in her gut, her chest, her throat. Blood staining the floor, her hands, the blade. Her partner crumpled on the ground, her nightmare looming above. Running from Adam, running from Beacon, running until there was nothing but Blake and crashing waves and salty air. Fear and guilt consuming every inch of her until it burned through her veins and settled in her bones and scorched her skin. Never quite dissipating even after she returned to the island she never could bring herself to call home, because after all, she’d always found that word more fitting for the people and experiences that took up residence in her heart and memories.

Sometimes it seemed like no matter how hard she tried, she was simply doomed to the life of a vagabond.

But maybe, in finding them, she’d finally made it home.

Blake faced Yang and reached out to take her trembling hand. “I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t run away anymore,” she said, holding up her pinkie. “I want to make the same promise to you. All of you. I know it may not mean much since they’re only words, but I want to walk with you every step of the way.”

Yang stared for a moment. “It’s gonna be a long journey.”

“First step’s the hardest.”

“Huh.” After a long moment, she extended her own pinkie and hooked it around Blake’s.

“You know,” Blake said, drawing Ruby and Weiss’s attention away from the one cloud in the sky. She held up the binder and tapped the cover. “I think you’ll have to change your title one more time. But it might be easier to come up with new team names now, since Team RWBY can stand on its own.”

Ruby’s face lit up and she threw her arms in the air. “Team RWBY back together again!” she said, drawing laughs from the others.

“We probably have time before everyone else wakes up,” Blake said. “You want to read it together? Sometimes all a story needs to be perfect is the right narrator.”


End file.
